What It All Means This Week: Global Warming: Don’t Tell Them, Show Them, Open Source: The Union of Concerned Scientists, fed up with lawsuits filed by the US automakers claiming the new fuel standards proposed by 15 US states and the Canadian federal government are unachievable, has unveiled an Open Source minivan design that exceeds these standards using existing technology. Vehicles with comparable reductions in fuel consumption, using this design with existing bodies, could be introduced today. Undoing the Cheney/Bush Damage: A recent NYT op-ed listed the things the next US government must do to undo the damage done to the US foundation of civil liberties and democracy by the Bush Regime. What’s depressing about this list is that it doesn’t even scratch the surface. It could take decades to rebuild what has been destroyed: the entire civil state. SEC Shows it Cannot Reign In Stock Fraud Epidemic: With desperate day-traders and other gambling addicts as a ready market, securities fraud has reached epidemic levels online, as boiler room touts push the price of worthless stocks higher and then bail out. The SEC has just suspended – for a few weeks – 35 stocks that were among the worst of the ‘pump-and-dump’ offenders, but the problem is that it’s rarely the companies’ executives who are at fault. Everyone’s a sucker for a get-rich-quick scheme, and some people argue this is just harmless gambling. But this problem is not limited to penny stocks. Over 90% of currency trades are purely speculative, and much commodities trade is as well. Whipsawing prices for these securities not only exploit human ignorance and greed, cause great hardship and grief to the families of the addicts, and disguise massive frauds, they can seriously damage economies and trade in the process. The SEC probably lacks the authority to really act, and even if it did, it’s doubtful they would have the courage. A lot of very rich (and now powerful) people have made their fortune in this dangerous Ponzi lottery. More Evidence the Oil Peak Has Been Reached: A new analysis in The Oil Drum shows that Saudi Arabia, despite pumping more and more high-pressure water into their wells to try to keep production up, is now in a production free-fall. How the MidEast Sees the MidEast ‘Problem’: Two recent stories, one by an Iranian ex-parliamentarian in the Iranian press (warning the people of Iran that the Iranian government needs to rein in its rhetoric), and the other in an Iraqi journal (decrying the involvement of foreign nations in Iraq’s affairs while the country, aided by US-supported government militias, descends further into civil war), show how little perspective we get in this part of the world on the political subtleties, the intractable challenges, and the pragmatism of civilians, in that part of the world. Thanks to Watching America for the links. Internet Video Self-Organizes to Replace TV: The popularity of UTube and its mostly amateurish, trashy content hides the profusion of quality video programming now coming online. Now some content aggregators are indexing and organizing content to help separate the wheat from the (tons of) chaff. Network2 offers one such service, and points to clips like this wonderful nature video from Wildcast and this NYT/Discovery Channel clip on how easy it is to make a nuclear bomb. Thanks to STBD for the link. Thought for the Week, from novelist Amy Hempel: “What you forget, living here, is that just because you have stopped sinking doesn’t mean you’re not still underwater.” |
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Hope — On the Balance of Probabilities
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Post Collapse with Michael Dowd (video)
Why Economic Collapse Will Precede Climate Collapse
Being Adaptable: A Reminder List
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A Future Without Us
Dean Walker Interview (video)
The Mushroom at the End of the World
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Beyond Belief
Complexity and Collapse
Requiem for a Species
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If We Had a Better Story...
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The Dark & Gathering Sameness of the World
The End of Philosophy
A Short History of Progress
The Boiling Frog
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A Culture Built on Wrong Models
Understanding Conservatives
Our Unique Capacity for Hatred
Not Meant to Govern Each Other
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Credulous
Amazing What People Get Used To
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The Dawn of Everything
Species Shame
Why Misinformation Doesn't Work
The Lab-Leak Hypothesis
The Right to Die
CoVid-19: Go for Zero
Pollard's Laws
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The Process of Self-Organization
The Tragic Spread of Misinformation
A Better Way to Work
The Needs of the Moment
Ask Yourself This
What to Believe Now?
Rogue Primate
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True Story
May I Ask a Question?
Cultural Acedia: When We Can No Longer Care
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A Harvest of Myths
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Ten Things to Do When You're Feeling Hopeless
No Use to the World Broken
Living in Another World
Does Language Restrict What We Can Think?
The Value of Conversation Manifesto Nobody Knows Anything
If I Only Had 37 Days
The Only Life We Know
A Long Way Down
No Noble Savages
Figments of Reality
Too Far Ahead
Learning From Nature
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An Age of Wonder
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We Make Zero
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If You Wanted to Sabotage the Elections
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Against Hope (Video)
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This Body Takes Me For a Walk
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What We Think We Know
Bark Bark Bark Bark Bark Bark Bark
Healing From Ourselves
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Nothing Needs to Happen
Nothing to Say About This
What I Wanted to Believe
A Continuous Reassemblage of Meaning
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The NYT/Discovery Channel nuclear bomb clip is already missing.